CVE Binary Tool quick start / README

The CVE Binary Tool is a free, open source tool to help you find known vulnerabilities in software, using data from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) list of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs).

The tool has two main modes of operation:

1. A binary scanner which helps you determine which packages may have been included as part of a piece of software. There are around 100 checkers which focus on common, vulnerable open source components such as openssl, libpng, libxml2 and expat.
2. Tools for scanning known component lists in various formats, including .csv, Python's requirements.txt, several linux distribution package lists, and several Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) formats.

It is intended to be used as part of your continuous integration system to enable regular vulnerability scanning and give you early warning of known issues in your supply chain.

See our documentation and quickstart guide

Usage: cve-bin-tool <directory/file to scan>

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -e, --exclude         exclude path while scanning
  -V, --version         show program's version number and exit
  --disable-version-check
                        skips checking for a new version

CVE Data Download:
  -n {json,api}, --nvd {json,api}
                        choose method for getting CVE lists from NVD
  -u {now,daily,never,latest}, --update {now,daily,never,latest}
                        update schedule for NVD database (default: daily)

Input:
  directory             directory to scan
  -i INPUT_FILE, --input-file INPUT_FILE
                        provide input filename
  -C CONFIG, --config CONFIG
                        provide config file
  -L PACKAGE_LIST, --package-list PACKAGE_LIST
                    provide package list
  --sbom {spdx,cyclonedx,swid}
                    specify type of software bill of materials (sbom)
                    (default: spdx)
  --sbom-file SBOM_FILE
                    provide sbom filename

Output:
  -q, --quiet           suppress output
  -l {debug,info,warning,error,critical}, --log {debug,info,warning,error,critical}
                        log level (default: info)
  -o OUTPUT_FILE, --output-file OUTPUT_FILE
                        provide output filename (default: output to stdout)  
  --html-theme HTML_THEME
                        provide custom theme directory for HTML Report
  -f {csv,json,console,html,pdf}, --format {csv,json,console,html,pdf}
                        update output format (default: console)
  -c CVSS, --cvss CVSS  minimum CVSS score (as integer in range 0 to 10) to
                        report (default: 0)
  -S {low,medium,high,critical}, --severity {low,medium,high,critical}
                        minimum CVE severity to report (default: low)
  --report              Produces a report even if there are no CVE for the
                        respective output format
  --affected-versions   Lists versions of product affected by a given CVE (to facilitate upgrades)
  -b [<distro_name>-<distro_version_name>], --backport-fix [<distro_name>-<distro_version_name>]
                        Lists backported fixes if available from Linux distribution

Merge Report:
  -a INTERMEDIATE_PATH, --append INTERMEDIATE_PATH      
                        provide path for saving intermediate report 
  -t TAG, --tag TAG     provide a tag to differentiate between multiple intermediate reports
  -m INTERMEDIATE_REPORTS, --merge INTERMEDIATE_REPORTS           
                        comma separated intermediate reports path for merging
  -F TAGS, --filter TAGS           
                        comma separated tags to filter out intermediate reports

Checkers:
  -s SKIPS, --skips SKIPS
                        comma-separated list of checkers to disable
  -r RUNS, --runs RUNS  comma-separated list of checkers to enable

Deprecated:
   -x, --extract        autoextract compressed files
   CVE Binary Tool autoextracts all compressed files by default now

You can also do python -m cve_bin_tool.cli which is useful if you're trying the latest code from the cve-bin-tool github.

Note that if the CVSS and Severity flags are both specified, the CVSS flag takes precedence.

--input-file extends the functionality of csv2cve for other formats like JSON. It also allows cve-bin-tool to specify triage data so you can group issues which may have been mitigated (through patches, configuration, or other methods not detectable by our version scanning method) or mark false positives. Triage data can be re-used and applied to multiple scans. You can provide either CSV or JSON file as input_file with vendor, product and version fields. You can also add optional fields like remarks, comments, cve_number, severity.

Note that you can use -i or --input-file option to produce list of CVEs found in given vendor, product and version fields (Usage: cve-bin-tool -i=test.csv) or supplement extra triage data like remarks, comments etc. while scanning directory so that output will reflect this triage data and you can save time of re-triaging (Usage: cve-bin-tool -i=test.csv /path/to/scan).

-n or --nvd specify method used to fetch known vulnerability data from NVD. 'api' is the default.

You can also use -m or --merge along with -f --format and -o --output-file to generate output from intermediate reports in different formats. Use -F --filter along with -m --mergeto filter out intermediate reports based on tag.

Note: For backward compatibility, we still support csv2cve command for producing CVEs from csv but we recommend using new --input-file command instead.

-L or --package-list option runs a CVE scan on installed packages listed in a package list. It takes a python package list (requirements.txt) or a package list of packages of systems that has dpkg, pacman or rpm package manager as an input for the scan. This option is much faster and detects more CVEs than the default method of scanning binaries.

You can get a package list of all installed packages in

• a system using dpkg package manager by running dpkg-query -W -f '${binary:Package}\n' > pkg-list
• a system using pacman package manager by running pacman -Qqe > pkg-list
• a system using rpm package manager by running rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME}\n' > pkg-list

in the terminal and provide it as an input by running cve-bin-tool -L pkg-list for a full package scan.

You can use --config option to provide configuration file for the tool. You can still override options specified in config file with command line arguments. See our sample config files in the test/config

The 0.3.1 release is intended to be the last release to officially support python 2.7; please switch to python 3.6+ for future releases and to use the development tree. You can check our CI configuration to see what versions of python we're explicitly testing.

If you want to integrate cve-bin-tool as a part of your github action pipeline. You can checkout our example github action.

This readme is intended to be a quickstart guide for using the tool. If you require more information, there is also a user manual available.

How it works

This scanner looks at the strings found in binary files to see if they match certain vulnerable versions of the following libraries and tools:

All the checkers can be found in the checkers directory, as can the instructions on how to add a new checker. Support for new checkers can be requested via GitHub issues.

Limitations

This scanner does not attempt to exploit issues or examine the code in greater detail; it only looks for library signatures and version numbers. As such, it cannot tell if someone has backported fixes to a vulnerable version, and it will not work if library or version information was intentionally obfuscated.

This tool is meant to be used as a quick-to-run, easily-automatable check in a non-malicious environment so that developers can be made aware of old libraries with security issues that have been compiled into their binaries.

Requirements

To use the auto-extractor, you may need the following utilities depending on the type of file you need to extract. The utilities below are required to run the full test suite on Linux:

• file
• strings
• tar
• unzip
• rpm2cpio
• cpio
• ar
• cabextract

Most of these are installed by default on many Linux systems, but cabextract and rpm2cpio in particular might need to be installed.

On windows systems, you may need:

• ar
• 7z
• Expand
• pdftotext

Windows has ar and Expand installed in default, but 7z in particular might need to be installed. If you want to run our test-suite or scan a zstd compressed file, We recommend installing this 7-zip-zstd fork of 7zip. We are currently using 7z for extracting jar, apk, msi, exe and rpm files.

If you get an error about building libraries when you try to install from pip, you may need to install the Windows build tools. The Windows build tools are available for free from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/

If you get an error while installing brotlipy on Windows, installing the compiler above should fix it.

pdftotext is required for running tests. (users of cve-bin-tool may not need it, developers likely will.) The best approach to install it on Windows involves using conda (click here for further instructions).

Feedback & Contributions

Bugs and feature requests can be made via GitHub issues. Be aware that these issues are not private, so take care when providing output to make sure you are not disclosing security issues in other products.

Pull requests are also welcome via git.

The CVE Binary Tool uses the Black python code formatter and isort to keep coding style consistent; you may wish to have it installed to make pull requests easier. We've provided a pre-commit hook (in .pre-commit.config.yaml) so if you want to have the check run locally before you commit, you can install pre-commit and install the hook as follows from the main cve-bin-tool directory:

pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install

Security Issues

Security issues with the tool itself can be reported to Intel's security incident response team via https://intel.com/security.

If in the course of using this tool you discover a security issue with someone else's code, please disclose responsibly to the appropriate party.